1. Field of the Invention
The instant disclosure relates to a portable electronic device and an operation method thereof; in particular, to a portable electronic device that has an always-on image capturing module to continually detect images and an operation method thereof.
2. Description of Related Art
With the development of mobile technology and electric commerce, barcodes are not only used and seen in shopping malls or super markets, but have become an all-purpose media providing all kinds of information to the public. For example, the two-dimensional barcode, such as the QR code, is commonly seen on walls or boards in public spaces, or even with the appearance on a bus, for users to scan and then to link to a certain website or to obtain a certain social messaging account.
Generally, if the user's portable electronic device is operating in a working mode, the user needs to turn on the master camera and to execute an application for scanning and decoding the barcode. If the user's portable electronic device is operating in a resting mode, the user additionally needs to make his portable electronic device operate in the working mode first; however, it is sometimes not easy when the user is too busy to wake up his portable electronic device manually.
In addition, with respect to the widely used QR code, the first step for detection is to determine its anchor points, which are the three “”-shaped pattern at three of corners of the barcode image. As known, most of portable electronic devices use their master cameras to detect the anchor points. Refer to FIG. 1. FIG. 1 shows a schematic diagram showing how to determine whether a captured image is a barcode image having a predetermined pattern feature in the prior art. Most traditional barcode detectors of portable electronic devices use the frame buffer to detect the whole image frame of the barcode image. As shown in FIG. 1, in the prior art, the anchor points of the QR code are found by determining whether the detected image has a pattern feature that is an area ratio “3×3:5×5:7×7”. However, the detection for the whole image frame of a barcode image needs a complex computation.